


Growing Cold

by greerwatson



Series: Depths of Cold [2]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-18 18:15:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18255260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/pseuds/greerwatson
Summary: Young Leonard returns to live with his father after Lewis gets out of Iron Heights.





	Growing Cold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivulet027](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivulet027/gifts).



The call came from Iron Heights only days before Lewis’s release.  It was Grammie who picked up; and she was stricken at the sound of his voice.  Lenny’s grandparents had long since stopped talking of Lewis, perhaps with the silent, secret hope that he would die in some prison riot.  Perhaps they simply put from their minds the unthinkable prospect of one day losing their grandson.  Now they had to prepare him to meet a man he scarcely remembered.

If Lewis was disturbed by the fact that his son didn’t recognize him, he didn’t let it show.  All he said was, “You look like your Mom, round the eyes a bit,” and after a moment added, “but take more after me, I think.”

“You got the letter about Rochelle?” put in Gramps.

“Yes,” said Lewis, and said no more about his wife, then or later.

To his in-laws’ relief, it quickly became clear that Lewis had no intention of whisking Lenny away that very day.  The Hadley Avenue house had stood empty for years:  there was no saying what state it might be in.  In any case, he had to pick up such threads of his old life as he could, check in with his parole officer, and find a job.  Nevertheless, he made it clear that “Leo” was his:  his to take, as soon as may be.

Through all the discussion between the grown-ups, Lenny (or Leo) stood silent, save when addressed.  He did not, of course, want to go.  Equally, it had been made clear to him that his custody was a grown-up matter.  The decision lay with the adults; and nothing he could say would make any difference.  Furthermore, it was important—“ _Very important_ ,” stressed Gramps—that Lenny learn to love his father as Lewis loved him.  So, quaking with nerves he dared not show, he looked at the stranger in the living room.  His father was tall, hard, and certain; and neither Gramps nor Grammie dared gainsay him.  Lenny would be reft from all that was loved and familiar, taken by a man he didn’t know to a house he couldn’t remember.

In fact, it was over a month before Lewis was finally ready to take his son away.

In the interim, he came by most days to give his son a chance to get to know him again; and his in-laws took pains to get the boy used to saying “Dad” to him.  Gramps came round to Hadley Street to help fix the roof and repair broken windows; Lewis painted the place inside and out; damaged furniture was hauled away.  Leo’s room, in particular, got a total makeover:  the short child’s bed was replaced, the tinkly mobile thrown out, and the room decorated by Grammie with cowboy-themed spread and curtains.  Lewis enrolled Leo in the local public school, found a church for Sunday school, and signed him up with a pediatrician and a dentist.  Finally, he packed clothes and toys and books in the trunk of his new secondhand car, and drove away with the boy sitting beside him in the passenger seat.  “Begin as you mean to go on,” he said cheerfully to the social worker who came round to evaluate the home situation.  She wrote up a favourable report, and passed on the Snart file to another caseworker who checked in, briefly, every two or three months.

That first year was mostly good for Leo.  Hadley Park Primary School had expectations that might have daunted another child from the old neighbourhood; but he rose to the challenge, eager to learn.  His new friends sometimes played different games in the schoolyard, but he quickly learned the rules.  Once a week, his teacher took the class to the school library.  The first time, Leo picked out _Treasure Island_ only for her to take it away, tell him it was too old for him, and hand him a Little Golden Book instead.  However, he had by now his own ticket to the public library, and it turned out the local branch had a copy of _Treasure Island_ , so he got to read it after all.  On Halloween, he dressed up as a pirate; and his Dad saw him round the local streets, where he collected a large sack of candy and nearly filled his UNICEF box with pennies and nickels.  For Christmas, he was given a pair of skates, and a few days later taken to the rink to try them out.  He and Dad watched hockey on TV; and, a month later, he had the thrill of going to his very first game, where they saw the Central City Combines play in real life.  They both cheered them on as loud as they could.  The team lost, which was disappointing; but, as Dad said, the season wasn’t over yet.

Every couple of weeks, Dad popped Leo in the car and drove him downtown to visit Grammie and Gramps.  He played a bit with his old friends, ran indoors to eat his lunch, and told his grandparents all about his new school and learning to skate.  In one home he was “Leo” and the other he was “Lenny”; this soon became normal.  Gramps still told him stories of the War; Grammie still asked him if he’d said his prayers at night.  He added their half-dollar pocket money to the buck from Dad, and spent it on comics and candy.

From Lewis’s perspective, on the other hand, that first year was one long frustration.  Everyone assumed he had stolen the Maximilian Emerald.  After all, his father had been a locksmith; so, he must therefore have known how to break into the museum.  His lawyer had been glib enough that, with the lack of physical evidence, the charge of theft had not been proved in court; but that just meant that he’d beaten the rap.  As a former police officer, he had been put in protective custody, which likely saved him from beatings, if not worse.  But the guards had no love for him; nor had he access to the prison jobs and classes that count so well with the parole board.  He had therefore served most of his sentence, and got out to a cold, unwelcoming world.  To the crooks he was just another dirty cop; to the cops, he was a dirty con.  If he’d been guilty only of the usual venalities of crooked cops—petty pay-offs and bribes, or rolling the occasional drunk—then there might have been some surreptitious sympathy.  However, his crime was so far beyond the expected as to border on the inconceivable.  None of his former buddies on the force wanted to know him.

His parole officer found him a job at a garage halfway across town.  The owner, who had an uncle who’d got in trouble, was amenable to giving an ex-con a chance.  Lewis ought to have been grateful.  He knew enough about cars to be a fair mechanic:  the job was one he could do, well enough.  But it was an oily, grimy job that left him feeling dirty in a way that stealing the emerald never could have.  Also, it didn’t pay very well.  And, all assumptions to the contrary, he had no secret stash from previous jobs.

It was not that Lewis had expensive habits.  Well, he didn’t think so.  He was a working stiff.  Still, he had taxes to pay and a kid to feed; and, as a man just out of jail, he wanted company.  Not just the occasional hooker, either.  He was, in those days, tall and strong and not bad looking if he did say so himself; and he knew how to show a girl a good time.  But he didn’t just want a good-time girl:  he wanted someone who’d move in, cook and clean, and show the neighbours—and social services—that Lewis Snart had learned his lesson and become an honest citizen.

He toed the straight and narrow for maybe six months before he decided enough was enough and tried a bit of burgling.  Nothing ambitious.  He figured that was the problem with huge fancy emeralds:  you couldn’t fence them.  Instead, he drove a few blocks west, picked a fancy house with no car in the drive, went back after dark, and broke in round the back.  He sold the proceeds to a familiar fence:  in that respect an ex-cop had advantages, even after a few years inside.  Moreover, though he’d been only in blues, he knew enough about detectiving to pull his next job out of the area where he lived.

The money got spent damned fast.

When Lewis cased the house in Brookfield Heights, he initially decided it would be too tough to get inside.  But the owners were well-off, if not rich; they had locks but no alarms; and he found out they were on vacation.  It was too good to pass up.  So that first time he took Leo with him, he simply needed the boy to slip through an old-fashioned milk hatch.  Still, he hesitated.  Kids talk.  Perhaps, he thought, he could tell him it was a secret game just between the two of them, and not to tell his Gramps or Grammie or his teacher or any of his friends at school.  Then he thought better of it:  expecting a boy that age to keep his mouth shut about a “game” was a fool’s hope.

“Dad’s going to teach you how he does his job,” he said instead.  “You want to grow up to be like your old Dad, don’t you?”

Leo nodded.

“These folks have things they’ll never miss,” said Lewis.  “Hardly fair, right?  We can use the money better than they ever do.  Just follow me, keep your voice down—way, way, _whisper_ down—and don’t touch anything.”

He put winter gloves on the boy anyway.  In the house, though, Leo stayed quiet and kept his hands to himself as instructed.  Lewis felt flat-out proud of him: a real chip off the old block.  He even thought of slipping his son a share of the loot.  Maybe a ten-spot.  But a kid Leo’s age flashing his money at the corner store would draw suspicion—unless it was his birthday or something like that, of course; but it wasn’t.  So instead Lewis took Leo to the zoo.  But he also took him down to the basement and started showing him some of the skills his own father had taught him.

Leo’s clever little hands took easily to picklocks; and soon he could lift a watch off Lewis’s wrist without him hardly even noticing.  From Lewis’s point of view, it made sense to take the kid with him on other jobs:  better than trying to find himself a partner he probably couldn’t trust not to double-cross him.

Leo was thrilled to be learning the ropes.  He felt so grown-up and useful helping Dad.


End file.
